Daily Archives: May 10, 2018

I’ll let you in on a little secret : people have always been telling me to put a sock in it. I’ve been an annoyingly opinionated SOB my entire life, but now that I have some online outlets for my opining, I’m far more reserved in my daily interactions with folks. Even still, when you’ve got a side gig as a critic, plenty of people are still going to wish you’d shut up and go away. But what if you shut up — and don’t go away?

Canadian cartoonist Georgia Webber had to live through the answer to that question when a sudden and quite severe throat injury forced her into months of physically- and medically-mandated silence, and to call her experiences “devastating” is probably to sell them a bit too short — but they do make for fascinating, engrossing, and revelatory reading in her new (-ish, more on that…

Marlene Dietrich is TCM’S Star of the Month for May, and “Shanghai Express” airs tonight at 12:00 midnight EST.

A train ride from Peking to Shanghai is fraught with danger and romance in Josef von Sternberg’s SHANGHAI EXPRESS, a whirlwind of a movie starring that Teutonic whirlwind herself, Marlene Dietrich. This was the fourth of their seven collaborations together, and their biggest hit, nominated for three Oscars and winning for Lee Garmes’s striking black and white cinematography.

The Director and his Muse

Dietrich became a huge sensation as the sultry seductress Lola Lola in Sternberg’s 1930 German film THE BLUE ANGEL, and the pair headed to America to work for Paramount. Marlene became the autocratic director’s muse, as he molded her screen image into a glamorous object of lust and desire. Sternberg’s Expressionistic painting of light and shadows, aided by Dietrich’s innate sexuality, turned the former chorus girl and cabaret…

Despite featuring Jacob Tremblay, this is apparently not a sequel to The Book of Henry…

To be honest, the trailer is kind of bleh. Then again, it really doesn’t have to be anything spectacular. Most people who see this film are going to see it because of The Predator name, as opposed to anything that may or may not be in the trailer. Predator is a bit like Alien and The Terminator. There’s always going to be, at the very least, a curiosity factor whenever a new chapter in the franchise comes out.

That said, the film is directed by Shane Black, who is a freaking genius, and the script was co-written by Fred “Night of the Creeps” Dekker. So, I’ll give it a look.